Doctor Who> The TARDIS Crashes?

So….turns out not only was the rumor a couple of weeks ago true, it’s much, much worse.

The Sun was telling us the Doctor Who Christmas episode was cancelled. Not everybody believed it given their track record, but I still discussed the benefits of that. The issue was no Doctor had been announced and the time to write, edit, make costumes, film, edit the recording, make all the graphics and effects, and then get it out was running out of timeline. Then a reporter at The Sun learned from a source that they were canceling the special. The BBC assured us that wasn’t the case.

With Disney+ confirming they will not be partnering on the next season of the sci-fi show, the BBC remain fully committed to the show and will announce plans for the next series in due course to ensure the Doctor’s adventures continue.

Lindsay Salt, Director of Drama, BBC said: “We’d like to thank Disney+ for being terrific global partners and collaborators over the past two seasons, and for the upcoming The War Between the Land and the Sea. The BBC remains fully committed to Doctor Who, which continues to be one of our most loved dramas, and we are delighted that Russell T Davies has agreed to write us another spectacular Christmas special for 2026. We can assure fans, the Doctor is not going anywhere, and we will be announcing plans for the next series in due course which will ensure the TARDIS remains at the heart of the BBC.”

About both of those things: no. Not only is the Christmas episode canceled, but Davies will not be writing for the Doctor at all, because even if the Doctor is not going anywhere, Bad Wolf Production is. While that’s the best news out of all of this, it still leaves the future of TARDIS in doubt, and points out they’ve probably been lying to us.

Here’s the latest press release from the official website:

As part of securing the next phase of the show for future generations, and in line with the BBC’s Charter and Agreement requirements, the BBC will put Doctor Who out to competitive tender this year. Doctor Who remains an important part of the BBC and this tender underpins the BBC’s continued commitment to Doctor Who ensuring audiences will enjoy the show for years to come.

After careful consideration, the BBC, Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode. This decision was not taken lightly, and we know it will be disappointing for fans, but in order to set the show up for future series, it was decided that rather than bridge the gap with a one off special, we are choosing to push forward to invest in the long-term future of the show which ensures that when the TARDIS lands once more, it does so in all its glory.

Oh, it’s not disappointing me. Davies was trashing Christmas and Christmas symbols even in the “good” run when he first brought the show back to the telly. The fact that he’s off the Christmas stories makes me happy. I’m also not going to miss him in the rest of the show, as this “bad” run was full of Davies leaning more into his social values than his storytelling ones, not undoing or even ignoring the “Timeless Child”, and letting his lead actor chase people away from the show, telling them to “touch grass”. Turns out they did and nobody was watching the Crying Doctor in his flamboyantly gay stereotype incarnation. Speaking of Davies, he took to Instagram to make his own update.

As a result, there won’t be a Christmas Special – we only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it…

For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor.

So they lied. While they never claimed to have a Doctor (rumors suggested they were all turning the role down, however), they did claim to have a script and it was so amazing you guys.

Now I’m as excited as anyone to see what comes next! Will they keep the theme tune? Will they lose the blue box? Will they bring back the Drahvin?! It’s all up for grabs, which is so Doctor Who, exciting and unpredictable and new!

I had to look them up. Don’t bring back the Drahvin. There’s a clip somewhere where Davies and Steven Moffat are discussing the TARDIS and Davies is talking about all these things he could do that breaks the iconography, while Moffat made the case for the iconography. Not that either one of them got the control room right, but that’s another discussion. The problem was there were too many changes:

• Disney+: The time change in the UK probably didn’t help the ratings much, as Disney pushed for a time that would allow American audiences to see the show at the same time as the UK, except thanks to time zones the UK would be asleep when it released on the iPlayer. Turning UNIT into something more akin to SHIELD with a headquarters more fitting the Avengers (the Marvel version, not Steed and Peel) was also a bad idea. Some British fans seemed to think it lost some of it’s Britishness, and having a Doctor played by an actor who wasn’t British this last run enhances that perspective. The next company to work on this show should be British and work with the AMC team-up to stream in the US, and that’s all they should be doing: streaming the new episode on their site and airing it on BBC America so it will actually be BBC again.
• Making the Doctor a woman: not because it would make an interesting story but to appease certain voices on the internet. that could have been explained but it wasn’t. It just happened and even a Moffat story had a dude regenerating back into a woman. Both times the “female presenting” regeneration was treated as the better form. Maybe if Jodie Whittaker had been given a good Doctor to play instead of someone with less social skills than I have, didn’t do the next one on this list, and actually tried to make her work with established history it could have worked. Instead we got…
• The Timeless Child: The idea that the Time Lords got their regenerative skills from a mad scientist examining a kid who fell to ground from a portal isn’t that unbelievable. The Time Lords were jerks, which is the nicest word I can use given my penchant to avoid swearing on this site whenever possible. The idea that the Doctor WAS that Child? Sorry, no. The Doctor does not need to be the most special person ever, and it robs William Hartnell of being the first canonical Doctor as well as the first actor. You know what else led to that?
• The Time Lords are dead–TWICE: Davies decided to invent a “time war” to kill off all of the Time Lords and make the Doctor the only Time Lord left. He also made 10 so important that I called him the God Doctor for a reason. Moffat would find a way to restore the Time Lords, and then didn’t do much with them but still made them bend the knee to the Doctor. Chris Chibnall came along and definitively killed them off again, which is where they currently lie. So the Doctor is the most important outside of the two renegades that somehow also survived the Time War and all three creators did good and bad things with at one point or another. So much for “Gallifrey Falls No More”.
• Invasion of the Culture War: Moffat introduced gay characters, plus Davies gave us Captain Jack because I’m still convinced he was using Doctor Who to push Torchwood. However, they were just there. When Davies came back the Doctor had to be gay, too. 14 was kind of gay while pushing the 13/Kaz fanship and for some odd reason Tegan and Nyssa. 15 had a boyfriend and a story that included him having a straight relationship with a baby because the villain reshaped reality to his vision of perfect and of course he was a stand-in for the online critics of Davies’ second run and Chibnall’s. (Apparently they’re friends, and both killed the Time Lords.) 13 hates guns but will leave giant mutant spiders to suffocate in a panic room, call it the more humane method, and ruin the Trump stand-in’s hotel, while in the first run they killed an American President during, if I have my timeline straight, Bush Jr was President. A heavy-handed racism episode had a future racist (don’t ask, they didn’t care) going back in time to stop Rosa Parks. One villain was an incel whose de-evolution to sperm that was cleaned up by a vacuum cleaner robot was met by laughter by the Doctor. The Star Beast adaptation with the wrong Doctor shoved in pronoun discussion and Donna’s son transitioning into her daughter…and we could talk about that “male presenting Time Lord” nonsense used in the WRONG way to undo the bad thing they did to Donna. There’s more (Davros) but I think I’ve made my point on this one and there’s one more.
• Is this still a kids show?: The original series was for kids, despite a body count you’d expect from a Japanese action kids show. (Is the Kamen Rider franchise meant for an older audience than Super Sentai?)  The new show never felt like a kids show. From time wars to the above to the Doctor’s various romances most kids wouldn’t care about (remember when 8 kissing Grace was a huge nono to the fans?), to a bunch of commentary that nobody cared about to that thing in the piano, it just doesn’t seem like a kids show. There’s a cartoon coming out for kids, but there shouldn’t need to be. The Sarah Jane Adventures was also treated as a kids show, but they both shared a universe with the definitely NOT for kids Torchwood and The War Between The Land And The Sea, which would have bored kids to death even if they watched it. The best kids show in the New Who period seems to be K9, and the BBC weren’t even involved in that and it’s probably not canon as a result.

I’ve already gone over how you can use the Rose incarnation to fix the show. I’ve also gone over how Davies needs to own his failure and learn from it. I know what I’d like to see, and that’s an article all its own (which I thought I already did but I can remedy that at some point) but a return to serials is probably unlikely, plus my perspective is as an American. To me it looks like Davies was trying to end the show so he wouldn’t be brought back, the opposite of John Nathan-Turner. In fact sexual orientation seems to be the only thing they do have in common. Davies would try to end the show on his Rose Tyler/Billie Piper obsession. Donna’s kid was even named…Rose. There are reasons so many fans who aren’t slaves to The Brand when it tosses out what made them fans in the first place are probably excited by this news rather than disappointed. It wasn’t Doctor Who anymore whether they were there from the original series or just joined up with the new show. Better to let it rest in peace than continue to be corrupted.

So how long will Doctor Who be in limbo, and is there even anyone out there who can fix the show AND be able to get into the spot to do so? We’ll sell, but it’s not looking good for the lastish Time Lord.